Do our Project Delimitations Display a Continued Legacy of Colonialism? Towards an independant Flora of Cambodia. តើការកំណត់ព្រំដែននៃគម្រោងរបស់យើងបង្ហាញពីការបន្តនៃអាណានិគមនិយមទេ? ឆ្ពោះទៅរករុក្ខជាតិឯករាជ្យរបស់កម្ពុជា។

Information

ceheaee doi: 10.3897/biss.7.110680

Conference Abstract

B S S Biodiversity Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 7: e110680

Do our Project Delimitations Display a Continued
Legacy of Colonialism? Towards an independant
Flora of Cambodia.
lAMIAPapiisisamsgumippoupHiy iA veAnwan
isudwmamsauyts ?

ig“ ishamiyAniMwhAndis;gmaAssivApissnyM

Visotheary Ung *
+ UMR 7205 CNRS-MNHN-SU-EPHE-UA, PARIS, France

Corresponding author: Visotheary Ung (visotheary.ung@mnhn.fr)

Received: 07 Aug 2023 | Published: 09 Aug 2023

Citation: Ung V (2023) Do our Project Delimitations Display a Continued Legacy of Colonialism? Towards an
independant Flora of Cambodia.tamin[BaifiisisamaguanpuNyNAv ALY UAvan iscWMaAMsaLuis ?
IglsishaMyAiniM WwaANHisigMAS SU APIs MAM. Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 7:
e€110680. https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.7.110680

Abstract

Cambodia, located in continental Southeast Asia, is renowned for its rich and ancient
architectural art. One of its most notable treasures is the archaeological site Angkor Wat,
which holds the distinction of being a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site. However, Cambodia is also a developing
country and a biodiversity hotspot (Myers et al. 2000, Sodhi et al. 2010).

Regrettably, Cambodia's tragic and violent history has severely impacted the
understanding of its biodiversity, particularly its plant life. This was depicted by Zizka et al.
(2021), in one of their figures illustrating the significant decline in the number of recorded
species occurrences in Cambodia between 1970 and 1992. This period includes the civil
war from 1975 to 1979, which marked one of the most devastating genocides in human
history.

© Ung V. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0),
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

2 Ung V

France and Cambodia share a long history of relations and collaboration. The French
presence in Cambodia dates back to 1863 when Cambodia became a French protectorate.
It later became part of French Indochina in 1887, alongside other French colonies and
protectorates, such as Laos, Tonkin, Annam, Cochinchina, and Guangzhouwan in China.
This French presence not only facilitated the "rediscovery" of Angkor Wat and Angkor
Thom by Henri Mouhot, a French naturalist, botanist, and entomologist, but also
contributed to the collection of Cambodia's biodiversity. The protectorate status for
Cambodia ended in 1949, and it declared its independence in 1953.

During the same period, the "General Flora of Indo-China" (Gagnepain et al. 1907) began
its publication in 1907 and continued until 1951 by French editors. In 1960, this flora was
reinitiated as the "Flora of Cambodia, Laos, and Viét-Nam". Since 2013, it is jointly edited
by the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris and the Royal Botanic Garden of
Edinburgh.

The Flora of Cambodia project arose from a simple question: why is the flora still managed
jointly with Laos and Viét-Nam? Since the three countries have been independent since
1954, their respective floras should be separate and published independently. The project's
initial phase involves compiling an up-to-date understanding of Cambodia's plant life,
including an inventory of collections housed at the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle in
Paris and accessible Cambodian floristic data online through the Global Biodiversity
Information Facility (GBIF) and other sources (Joyce et al. 2020). The ultimate goal is to
produce a comprehensive flora of Cambodia. In the short term, the project aims to provide
an open and curated checklist of vascular plants of Cambodia, in multiple languages,
including Khmer and freely available following Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Re-
usable (FAIR) principles (Wilkinson et al. 2016). This endeavor seeks to empower both
Khmer botanists and the broader local community, allowing them to reclaim and cherish
their intrinsic knowledge of native plants.

Although still in its early stages, this project aims to further enhance the strong
collaboration between France and Cambodia while being FAIR and Collective benefit,
Authority to control, Responsability, Ethics (CARE) (Carroll et al. 2020).

Keywords

biodiversity, plant collections, vascular plants, curation, Khmer, open-data, FAIR, CARE

Presenting author

Visotheary Ung

Presented at

TDWG 2023

Do our Project Delimitations Display a Continued Legacy of Colonialism? ... 3

Acknowledgements

| would like to thank Thomas Burguiére and Dr Nicky Nicolson for their comments and
revisions.

Hosting institution

ISYEB UMR 7205 Centre National Recherche Scientifique, Museum National d'Histoire
Naturelle, SU, UA, ERPHE-PSL

Conflicts of interest

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

References

° Carroll SR, Garba |, Figueroa-Rodriguez O, Holbrook J, Lovett R, Materechera S,
Parsons M, Raseroka K, Rodriguez-Lonebear D, Rowe R, Sara R, Walker J, Anderson
J, Hudson M (2020) The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance. Data
Science Journal 19 https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2020-043

° Gagnepain F, Humbert H, Lecomte H (1907) Flore générale de I'Indo-Chine / publiée
sous la direction de H. Lecomte ; redacteur F. Gagnepain. Masson hittps://doi.org/
10.5962/bhi.title.44886

° Joyce E, Thiele K, Slik F, Crayn D (2020) Checklist of the vascular flora of the Sunda-
Sahul Convergence Zone. Biodiversity Data Journal 8 https://doi.org/10.3897/bdj.
8.e51094

° Myers N, Mittermeier R, Mittermeier C, da Fonseca GB, Kent J (2000) Biodiversity
hotspots for conservation priorities. Nature 403 (6772): 853-858. httos://doi.org/
10.1038/35002501

° Sodhi N, Posa M, Lee T, Bickford D, Koh L, Brook B (2010) The state and conservation
of Southeast Asian biodiversity. Biodiversity and Conservation 19: 317-328 10 1007
978. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-009-9607-5

° Wilkinson M, Dumontier M, Aalbersberg IJ, Appleton G, Axton M, Baak A, Blomberg N,
Boiten J, da Silva Santos LB, Bourne P, Bouwman J, Brookes A, Clark T, Crosas M,
Dillo |, Dumon O, Edmunds S, Evelo C, Finkers R, Gonzalez-Beltran A, Gray AG, Groth
P, Goble C, Grethe J, Heringa J, ’t Hoen PC, Hooft R, Kuhn T, Kok R, Kok J, Lusher S,
Martone M, Mons A, Packer A, Persson B, Rocca-Serra P, Roos M, van Schaik R,
Sansone S, Schultes E, Sengstag T, Slater T, Strawn G, Swertz M, Thompson M, van
der Lei J, van Mulligen E, Velterop J, Waagmeester A, Wittenburg P, Wolstencroft K,
Zhao J, Mons B (2016) The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and
stewardship. Scientific Data 3 (1). https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2016.18

° Zizka A, Ryden O, Edler D, Klein J, Perrigo A, Silvestro D, Jagers S, Lindberg S,
Antonelli A (2021) Bio-Dem, a tool to explore the relationship between biodiversity data

Ung V

availability and socio-political conditions in time and space. Journal of Biogeography 48:
2715-2726. https://doi.org/10.1111/jbi.14256